iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Moving DOE’s higher ed components to thr Labor Department only makes sense if you consider higher ed as job training.

Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Our most lasting houseware purchase was a set of napkin rings for the whole family when the kids were entering grade school. Used them regularly ever since.

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Here’s the context: “Saint John Chrysostom, one of the greatest preachers of the early Church, drew a direct line between the liturgical table and the street when he famously wrote: ‘He who said, “This is my body,” is the same One who said, “I was a stranger, and you did not invite me in.”’”

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Please don’t speak of a Kansas poll as “the Kansas result.” We won’t have the result until November.

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Back when I was a midshipman in NROTC, we’d refer to the guys from Annapolis as going to the “trade school.” Hegseth sure wants to make it one.

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

AI agents should be taught what every grad student learns before becoming a TA: “I don’t know” is an acceptable response.

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John Burn-Murdoch @jburnmurdoch.ft.com · 10/09/2026

New from us: Anthropic just published scenarios for AI’s possible economic impacts, which range from minimal, to explosive GDP growth of 15% by 2030 as knowledge-worker unemployment hits 18%. I sat down with their co-founder Jack Clark to pick his brains on how they’re thinking about all of this.

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Rich Raho @richraho.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

USCCB Labor Day Statement: “Pope Leo expressly acknowledges the great risks of AI for workers: de-skilling, surveillance, rigid and repetitive tasks, reduced agency and creativity, unemployment, job insecurity, concentrated power, and increased inequalities.”

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I couldn’t see anything to bring that on; what made you feel his absence?

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Dare one ask who edited that volume?

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

But in the writing process we can revise over and over, criticizing what our previous selves thought.

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

As someone thinking professionally about how science might work in an oral culture, this passage seemed right: “Writing is a rigorous process to understand your own thoughts and then lay those thoughts out in a way that convinces or inspires or moves other people. But speaking is not that process.”

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Diagram explains why USN went over to nuclear depth bombs and rockets in the tactical nuclear era.

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

“Trump … and his band of truculent lackeys won’t be around forever, but unless change comes soon, we’ll be paying for their mistakes for years to come.”

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Devastating news — the SBE started my career both in grad school (history of science) and a young faculty grant (hos and anthropology)

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Rich Raho @richraho.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

This church sits in a rather wealthy neighborhood of Chicago, and I’m reminded of John Chrysostom’s words: "If you cannot find Christ in the beggar at the church door, you will not find Him in the chalice."

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Commonweal @commonwealmagazine.org · 22/08/2026

The West still pictures India as rooted in Gandhian tradition. But it is Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s radical nationalism that drives Indian politics today. Shiv Parihar: 'India Without Gandhi' www.commonwealmagazine.org/india-withou...

commonwealmagazine.org

India Without Gandhi

The West still pictures India as rooted in Gandhian tradition. But it is Vinayak Damodar Savarkar's radical nationalism that drives Indian politics today.

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

The calculator analogy does hold up in the sense that few people taught in a calculator environment know how to do complex calculations, e.g. how to take a square root. By analogy, what complex reasoning skills will people taught in an AI environment lose (or never learn)?

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Look closely at this 1944 pic showing two hydraulic catapults on the flight deck. upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

“Ahh, but the strawberries! That’s— that’s where I had them.”

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

I enhanced the dragon’s heads for a talk I gave before the 2024 Great North American Eclipse

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

For “inertia” read “momentum” — I long for an edit key.

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Important historical thread on the bombing of Nagasaki, showing it to be more bureaucratic inertia than a decision by the president. Read the whole thread

View of rebuilt Immaculate Conception Cathedral (Urakami Cathedral) as seen from Nagasaki Peace Park (Nov 1964)

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Does this imply that people excluded from birthright citizenship by Trump’s XO are not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof?”

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Some recollections from grad school: In Platonic theory of vision, light gave the eye the power to reach out and “touch” the object of vision. This might clarify Ambrose’s meaning.

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

My first solar eclipse was a hybrid (annular for part of its track, total elsewhere). We saw a brief dramatic totality 🎉🎈🎺

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mburnamfink.bsky.social @mburnamfink.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

5 stars to @wellerstein.bsky.social fantastic book on Truman and the atomic bomb. I'm really glad it finally arrived on the top of my queue, in partnership with the Hiroshima accounts from my short story book group. www.burrowedbooks.com/book/the-mos...

burrowedbooks.com

The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age — Burrowed Books

A review of The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age by Alex Wellerstein.

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

Sorry, I missed the nice image of the reverse. The ornamented I might be a diagram of the local part of the rete; the triangle is a puzzle. There seem to be some other faint markings.

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

Might they be diagrams related to adjacent stars in a constellation or to the structure of the rete? A zoomed out view of the back of the rete marked with their places would help evaluate those ideas.

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Moving west from the Greek world, look at Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia.

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

WaPo changed perspective with new headline and lede: 2 U.S. service members killed, 1 missing after Iran attack on Jordan, military says Iran launched a wave of attacks on U.S. allies Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain as the U.S. military hit Iran, in the seventh consecutive day of clashes.

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Good investigation of ICE officers by the Times.

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

The author notes that astronomers studying transits of Venus ignored the astronomies native to the places where they observed. She was unaware that Le Gentil, who went to India for the transit, favorably compared the indigenous calculations of a lunar eclipse with contemporary European methods.

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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Forensic Architecture just published an in-depth investigation into the Minab school bombing in Iran that's well worth a read and watch forensic-architecture.org/investigatio...

forensic-architecture.org

Forensic Architecture

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Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · 16/07/2026

Since I completely forgot to post about my own presentation beforehand, here's the abstract. Thanks to everyone who came and/or chatted about the project with me afterwards. It was really useful to air some new ideas to a friendly crowd! Even more excited to get writing the book now!

Back to the Future of Wayfinding: Pre-modern astro-navigation in the GPS age

New technologies in the 20th century challenged the need for navigators to look to the stars. The rapid development of radio direction-finding, beam and hyperbolic systems, and finally satellite navigation, promised to make old methods redundant. An unfathomable global system of transmitters and receivers would replace skills in taking sightings and computing with brass and paper tools; the signals from atomic clocks would eclipse the long-fixed shapes of the constellations.

Yet from the beginning this march of new technology was contested. In the first place, while black-box systems promised to make knowledge of location and direction universally accessible, the cost of equipment raised new barriers. As prices plummeted and precision soared, concerns grew that sailors and pilots might lack the understanding necessary to interpret navigational data, leading to increased risk. It has even been suggested that reliance on technology rewires our brains, making us
stupider.

Meanwhile, as ‘traditional’ techniques became outmoded, interest surged in
reconstructing the seemingly miraculous methods of the past. Respect for the
astrolabe-toting heroes of the European ‘Age of Exploration’ was complicated by a
growing pluralistic awareness that their achievements had been preceded by a suite of skills and senses practised in the Pacific. In the Anthropocene, an instinctive feel for one’s environment seems ever more precious when alone atop a vast ocean.

Most recently, fears about the vulnerability of GPS systems to jamming or even spoofing have become stronger – and more realistic. Put together, these pressures have caused hydrographic offices and training schools to pull back from abandoning old materials and methods. This paper will survey the arguments of manufacturers and mapmakers, technologists and traditionalists – from the backstaff to the blue dot – to show why, in the age of Google, navigation is so contested.

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

What “Rogan Vance interview” are you talking about?

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

We’ve made our way from gold coins to “gold hued” coins. Welcome to the second gilded age. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_...

en.wikipedia.org

Gilded Age - Wikipedia

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Time to turn off autocorrect. A real time spellchecker is usually adequate warning of typos.

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

“The Church has a preferential option for the poor.… It’s a formal doctrinal position,… It means a living wage is not a socialist plot but a human right. Catholic social teaching insists on this point so often and explicitly that you have to work hard to miss it. Vance works hard to miss it.”

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

I’ve learned a secret of making flaky pie crust (half water / half vodka) but I’m still struggling with the craft of writing.

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Fine historical meditation on the Manhattan Project and its implications.

Mushroom cloud dominating a desert landscape,

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Fine, detailed account by noted Vaticanist, Nicole Winfield.

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Nonsense! Citing your sources—preferably to the exact page and with a link—allows your reader to check your interpretation of the sources.

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Steve McCluskey @stevemccluskey.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Looks like she’s listing to starboard; I presume they can clear that up with fuel and ballast.

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